Fear

"You learn that as you grow older, we live in a perpetual state of fear. All the horrible things we do to each other, all our misunderstandings, are because of fear."

The Old Jest. Jennifer Johnston, Page 98. Read in 2016.

Some new fears as I age. They would be unrecognizable to a younger me, then I would have classified them as "silly".

(1)Fear of becoming a crashing bore because of my health issues. So I avoid talking about them. Then, when questioned on my health status, I'm aware of looking shifty from such avoidance and quickly switch conversation to something else.

(2)Fear of the specialist I saw on Wednesday, my nephrologist, who has no time for my avoidance of 3 times daily blood pressure readings, no time for my water shortage ingestion in spite of his instructions. No time for my whiny "I can't live in the bathroom all the time" ("Oh, "sez he, in a bored monotone, "Then dialysis would be preferable?" He is excellent at what he does, but boy, bedside manner is not part of his genetic makeup. He handed me a list of what I need to do before seeing him in a month. Yes, I will comply. Feel the fear and do it anyway.

(3)Fear of getting lost. Due to my mobility issues, this is much more serious than for a healthier younger me, the running me, the adventurous me. Now when I am pounding down a sidewalk with my cane searching for something, store, medical office, etc., if it's not where I thought it was supposed to be I panic as my energy has evaporated, I need to sit down and there's nothing to sit on. So I lean, and breathe and want to cry in frustration. I was rescued by a kind stranger on Wednesday who gently guided me outside the building and led me to the correct clinic, taking time to allow for breaks. People are so very kind and caring.

(4)Fear of brain-fail. It takes me longer to learn new skills, like a knitting pattern. I have to repeat and repeat to lodge it in whatever remaining brain cell is still up for rental. Short term memory, unless I really, really concentrate, vanishes like a puff of smoke. I am mindful of working the brain via knitting, daily Scrabble, reading books outside my comfort zone. Challenging it.



(5)Political scene: femicides. A woman is murdered in Canada every 3 days by a man who purportedly loves her. The stats in many countries are similar. I've been present when men "jokingly" threaten wives that they would kill them if they caught them being unfaithful. Since I first became aware of how second class women are, way, way back in the fifties, I see regression in women's rights everywhere. Men who haven't a clue - as an example see that Gillette ad up there? - the outrage amongst some of my male friends was breathtaking. They take the line of "not all men" - neglecting, of course, to take a stand against the proliferation of porn, sex trafficking, prostitution, etc. which is so embedded in our culture as to be taken for granted. Women's (and many girl children's) bodies are commodities, products to be sold, trafficked at a whim. Trillion dollar rape industries. Imagine, I say to men I know, being anally raped twenty to a hundred times a day or giving blow jobs to hundreds of strangers. And they shudder.

A Teacher's Association Convention in Alberta booked a convicted murderer/rapist as their keynote speaker. You read that right. Only when the public outcry became a deluge did they cancel him. Read about it here.. The fact that they would even arrange all of this shows how deeply embedded rape culture is in our society: how female victims can be so thoroughly erased. And to make the story even more sordid - the reason he killed her was because he couldn't get an erection.

I fear for my own anger in these political situations. My rage is frightening to me at times and it doesn't abate as I age. It worsens. How on earth do I keep a lid on myself? How do I numb out and shrug and pretend all of this doesn't matter?

(6)Oddly enough, in such an anti-aging climate, I haven't a fear of wrinkles or age-spots, or "Looking my age" or greying. I tell people openly I am an old woman, or an elder or a crone and most react with:"You don't look it" with a little frisson. What's that about? What does "looking it" mean? Why the fear of growing old? Isn't the alternative so much worse? I have lost far too many dear ones not to celebrate my bonus years.

Anyway getting my thoughts of the day out there on paper.

As I struggle with a short memoir I am writing.

Ruminations 2

See Ruminations 1

But also see this previous post

What kind of world is it when yesterday someone I love was threatened with rape and death countless times (she stopped counting at 500) for posting the simple, scientific and biological fact of "Women don't have penises."

I had written a very long follow-up post to my previous one. But I'm not going to bother posting it.

Suffice to say is I only have one question for those who believe that being a woman is just a feeling:

Can you describe what that feeling is without resorting to stereotypes?

Please. I am serious.

The women with penises brigade and their supporters don't want to engage in any serious and respectful debate. Instead they spew hateful and murderous threats. It is absolutely frightening.

And yes, I know, just like #notallmen #notalltrans. But only 10% of trans have SRS. And are raised with all that masculine privilege affords them. And FYI: there were trans in my inner circle in Toronto.

I offer you this one insanity without comment, there are hundreds of others: an abused woman in a Toronto Women's Shelter.

Women have been colonized and oppressed for far too long. We need our safe spaces. Desperately. Including our girls. In a restaurant recently I was asked by a dad holding his little daughter's hand outside the washroom was it safe for her. Dear Goddess. We have come to this.

As to my beloved, the matter was reported to the police who announced they could do nothing in a world of free speech. Death threats are free speech. This is how women get murdered in Canada when they complain about restraining orders being ignored.

I'm too old for this shyte.

Loud and proud: The emperor wears no clothes.

/30

Ruminations

“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

― Margaret Atwood

On the love between women: "A certain tenderness, a certain reciprocity, not having to make allowances for the male compulsion and fundamental sense of superiority. What man doesn't have it? Gay men included."

- May Sarton

“Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.”

- Andrea Dworkin

For a couple of years Daughter tracked the number of women killed by their partners in Canada. It was difficult, traumatizing work but no one else was doing it. Police records are not helpful. Most of it is classified under "domestic incident", with the victims' names erased. She had to give it up as it was too painful and heartbreaking. Every 6 days in Canada a woman or girl is murdered by those who purportedly love them. These victims are not commemorated in any way. She wanted to start a wall of remembrance in her town rather than the planned wall/monument/hallelujah gizmo honouring another dead male soldier. The soldier won. They always do.

This inherent male violence still has the power to startle me. A male blogger, who projects an image of gentleness and compassion, was accosted recently by a female neighbour, one he dislikes, and his immediate reactive desire (not acted upon, thank heaven) was to punch her in the head "until her eyes popped out."

And yes, I know #notallmen - but that is not the point. Where are the #notallmen condemning their violent misogynistic brothers? ( PS they don't, reference an intense conversation I had on weekend with two good male friends).

Furthermore, I am getting so sick and tired of female statistics now being skewed by "transwomen" who are invading female bathrooms, jails, police cells, locker rooms and women's shelters and along with raping their victims and intimidating little girls insist on being called "women" while us born women are labelled "cis". Not to mention competing in women's athletics and winning trophies. And seriously, if you're trans, live long and prosper, but please keep your penised presence away from our most vulnerable spaces. And realize, please, you have absolutely no idea of what it is to have lived a woman's experience in this world. None. Stilettos and makeup and push up bras and the lipper and slap is all we are? Stereotype much? Seriously?

All I've ever wanted for myself and other women is liberation, to be who we want to be without the inherent underlying threat of male violence and control and now, goddess help us, we've admitted it to our most personal and private spaces.

And don't get me started on how most seem to conflate gender and sex.

That's another post entirely.

Diamonds and Stones

I'm back again.

First of all the stone:

We had some nasty stuff happening in CBC Canada - our national partially tax funded broadcaster - when a very popular male host of one internationally popular programme "Q" was outed as a sexual predator par excellence. It turns out he'd been abusing women for nearly thirty years. Horribly. Hitting interns on the head, etc. etc., beating girlfriends around and filming the acts. It has opened up a can of worms for women very rarely seen in this quiet, polite little land of ours. I won't link to all of it here BUT if you Google "Jian Ghomeshi" you will get a shyteload of disgusting and upsetting material. Trigger Warning.

Then the diamond:

It has opened up a dialogue about the rape culture and feminism the likes of which I've never seen before. Women coming forward, like myself, to discuss their own sexual assaults, hidden because of the hopelessness of dragging the cases through court and rarely succeeding and meanwhile wrecking one's own life in the process. Some of my blog friends have also come forward. Rape and sexual assaults are breathtaking in their scope and seeing the final light of day on so much of it is validating and heartening and so very wonderful. To breathe the air of truth again is so very powerful. As is the solidarity. I truly believe I don't have one single close female friend who hasn't been sexually assaulted or molested or any one of the filthy perversions of it and just kept quiet. Often as a child. Like I was. Or as an adult again I kept quiet. We've been trained to do this, keep quiet, be nice, don't say dirty things. He didn't mean it. Or better yet - he'll make life hell for you. I wasn't believed or heard and told to shut up. No more.

This whole horrible secret and depraved sexual violence of the CBC's cash cow has been split wide open. Much like Jimmy Savile and the BBC.

We just didn't have to wait till JG was dead before it was out there for all to see.

Adrienne Rich ( 1929-2012), Poet, Feminist, Shaman

The world is somehow a lesser place with the death of Adrienne Rich yesterday.

A few of her insights, gathered by me:

On learning from our elders:

The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.

On the absence of female history:

Of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.

On women trying to make it in a man's world:

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the shamanesses, the fierce marketwomen of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silkworkers of prerevolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

On Emily Dickinson:

Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sentimentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.

Date Rape is a Hoot.

Nephew: wats the best chat up line???
22 hours ago · Comment ·LikeUnlike R******D**** likes this.
E**** N***** ‎"Excuse me, do you think this rag smells like chloroform?"
21 hours ago · LikeUnlike · 2 people
Nephew and M**** C***** like this.
Me: I can't even list the amount of WRONGS in that appalling statement...
16 hours ago · LikeUnlike ·
K**** H*****: That is quite possibly the best 1 i've ever heard e****!!!
10 hours ago · LikeUnlike
D***** F**** Are u retarded cos u look special to me
2 hours ago · LikeUnlike
T***O'D****: guy puts a cold bottle against girl...girl reacts...sori bt ur so hot had 2cul u dwn sum how!

Above is an exchange on FaceBook over the last day. I italicized my own comment. The reason I posted a comment?

The originator of the original query is my nephew and the responses are from his friends. They are all around 21 years of age.

I am completely disgusted, discouraged and dismayed that this is how he and his friends feel about women. And that none addressed the comment of his aunt.

(1) Women need to be rendered unconscious to allow men to do whatever they choose with them?
(2) Women are not human and therefore not in need of any respect?
(3) Separate rules would apply for their sisters and mothers?
(4) Have any of them heard of date rape?
(5) Have they even attempted to think about themselves being victims of an incapitating drug administered by a stranger?

And on. I'm sooooo tired of all this.

I'm completely disheartened that this is a younger male relative (university student). My friends, this is how he and his peers are devolving.

Hello Gaia? Shrug us off. Right now.

The F word

I don’t take any of it for granted. Ever. My equal rights under Canadian law.

Once upon a time, you see, I didn’t have them.

I didn’t have them in Ireland where I grew up. Upon leaving college I was one of several women hired for the very first time as an accountant in a national organization. Great, you say? Well, the work itself was great, I enjoyed it.

Thing was, I was paid on the ‘female’ scale of pay. Yes, you read that right, all you born in the last 40 years. The ‘female accountant’ wages were half that of men. Even then, working for those 50% wages I was criticized by some (mainly those of the female persuasion) for taking the job over a deserving man.

And another thing: most days I was subject to verbal sexual harassment and double entendres by a few of my more primitive (and usually married) male colleagues. And complaining to the (male) boss was treated jovially, mockingly and could be summarized by the following phrases: “You should be flattered” and “Suck it up”. Par for the course. And I wasn’t alone, as my friends in other workplaces were harassed also. We would try and come up with strategies to minimise it, knowing we could never eliminate it.

It took until 1982 to have equality of the sexes enshrined in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 1982!

And who fought for those rights taken by so many young women for granted today?

That dirty F word. Feminists.

Definition of feminist:

Someone, male or female, who believes in social, political and economic equality between the sexes.

A word that has been taken and smeared and re-formed into “militant” and “bra-burner” and “lesbian” and “man-hater” by the patriarchal media to terrify women into becoming their old submissive selves.

I, for one, believe we are all born equal: male, female, gay, straight, cross-gendered, trans-gendered, black or white and all those wonderful variations between,

And I never take equality for granted.

And I will protest peacefully for equality, yours and mine and ours, till my dying day for the job is far from over: look towards the third world, look to any country which has a powerful religious stranglehold on the government - (Hello, Ireland and U.S.A!)

And I will speak out when I see injustice, prejudice and inequality based on gender, race or sexual orientation.

Feminist? Hell, yeah!